Welcome to the Piano World Piano ForumsOver 2 million posts about pianos, digital pianos, and all types of keyboard instruments
Join the World's Largest Community of Piano Lovers
(it's free)
It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

Given the ability of the strings to sustain sound (disregard if it's the recording only), you may want to take this a hair faster. Otherwise, the decay and subsequent striking of the note disrupts the lyricism and fluidity of the passage.

2:00 -- and don't shift in your seat! haha kidding

3:00 -- this passage feels like it should be a little quicker, even if you keep the opening slower. Maybe 4-7 beats faster? Not much.. just a hair? A little more like you take it at 4:20...

You have some vertical issues here, very slight, but noticeable. Especially as the broken rhythm speeds up (after the L'istesso tempo).

14:00 -- I really lost interest in this piece somewhere around the end of this trill. Not you. Not at all. Happened with Kissin, too. If I could go back in time and tell Beethoven to end this piece sooner, I would do just that.

What's your issue with the trill at the end? Timing? Or fatigue?

If it's fatigue, switch fingers. If it's timing, do it mathematically-- figure out how many times you oscillate per beat, and mathematically place the other notes. I don't think you had a terrible time with this, just a little inconsistent in the middle of the trill. But, I mean, minor stuff.

So when are you going to record the 3rd movement?

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.

Thanks to your patiently listening and commenting to those two movements.

There actually exists some problems as you noticed.

They're due to either my inaccuracy or the recording device I think, and it's a little hard to discuss each in detail.

About the trill at the end. I have really literally tiny hands, which could only reluctantly strech a 9nd and with very inefficient ligament. If I use the 4th and 5th fingers to play the trill, my hand will be totally strained and it becomes very hard to complesh the task. So I chose to play them with the 2th and 3th fingers and jump to some of the melody notes hand use my left hand to do some help. But it still seems hard though.

Ah, so you have to suffer a redistribution. If you play the trill with 35, can you reach those other notes with your thumb? At least some of them? If you can, then when it jumps to an octave, you can quickly switch to 45, and then back to 35. I do something similar in Liszt's La Campanella, and it looks like it may work here even if it's not ideal?

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.

can't reach any with 35. So it's no difference to use 232323152323... and when it's possible, sometmes, use left hand to play the melody.

Really? I'm actually shocked, then, at how small I think your hands are based on your response. If you're playing a 35 trill, what's the farthest your thumb can reach comfortably? I would have thought at least a 6th, even with small hands. No?

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.

Okay, phew. I would have been absolutely amazed if you could play as well as you can without being able to reach a 6th with the trill over it.

So, most of this is within that span. There are a couple pain in the tail measures, though. If we consider measure "1" to be the measure where the trill starts on D, and measure "2" the next measure, where there is a trill on "G" and a tremolo in the LH on EC, I can count this out..

You can play all the notes except the octave G's, but you can redistribute those into the LH without too much trouble. Problem spots look like:

The G at the start of measure 5The G at the start of measure 11The G at the end of measure 12

Would I be correct in assuming those are the three hardest notes to hit? If so, try alternating to 45 in the last half beat of the previous measure, since your LH is playing the inner line. Then, you can hit the G with the RH thumb, and immediately switch back to 35 for the trill.

In measure 11, you can even switch to 23 for the trill where the 2nd G (8th after the dotted quarter) is indicated.

Another option, which I think is less ideal, might be to time the trill so you play the bottom G in place of the G in the trill. Since they're an octave apart, and you're bringing out the inner line, the listener may not hear it. Pedal at least enough to lift the dampers off the note you're trilling so it resonates without getting muddled, and you should be able to get away with it.

Without trying it out myself, I wouldn't be able to offer much more than that since I'm not really familiar with this piece. But I hope that one of these options gives you something usable that you haven't tried before.

Incidentally, if you tuck your elbow into your body, and play the thumb up in the black key area, can you still not reach the octave with a 35 trill? (No problem if you can't, just wondering if maybe a slightly different hand position would help.)

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.

Evenness with long trills is a pain. I once heard Martha Argerich give an interview in which she said they made her cringe, so I have no problem admitting that I hate them, too. I think using non-adjacent fingers makes it easier (which is why I recommended 35 for this particular passage).

Good luck with it! I do hope it works out, and if you want to bounce any ideas off me, I'd be happy to check it out.

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.

With your experience, do you think Liszt's etudes are helpful enough to concentrate on?

I've never played them, and my teacher suggested some of them like the f minor of the 12 transcendentals and the 2nd of the paganini etueds. But I cringe from it because, according to my former experience of his works like the 2th hungarian rhapsody, it seems Liszt are always going to showing off his huge hands( or not that huge, who knows) through his works.

So I'm always more interested in Chopin's etudes. But this 111 inspired me that it seems I should try some Liszt's, like the famous, notorious, and vulgar La Comapanalla.

I definitely think so--there are some very good qualities to Liszt's etudes. Even if you don't want to get them up to performance snuff, there are a lot of technical elements that appear repeatedly in standard repertoire.

La Campanella is a great example, because the trill-over-a-melody skill features right in the middle of the etude.

The F-minor is quite possibly my favorite of the 12 transcendentals. I just mentioned it in another thread because I heard Kissin play it this past Friday in Carnegie Hall (as an encore). I doubt I will ever hear it played so well again.. just blew me away. I don't think he missed a single note.

The etudes can teach you a lot about musicality as well as technique.. Liszt writes so many hidden inner lines into the etudes that you can study them and study them and find something else to bring out each time. And the better you get at doing it, the better your overall playing becomes. (Conversely, the bang-bang approach many pianists take teaches you very little about them.) When you reach the pinnacle of piano performance, these etudes are really one of the last places you can go to continue to develop (IMO).

For you, I would highly recommend taking a crack at 'em, especially if your teacher is also onboard with the idea. I can hear it in your playing; you're there. I think you'd probably find it fun and challenging, yes?

As far as huge hands go.. there are a few stretches in Liszt's works that are daunting for me, too. I don't have the largest hands. But the better you get at moving, the less of a stretch it seems. When you can replace the word "stretch" with "movement" in Liszt's works, you'll know you've hit the next tier of playing. I've found that most of the stretches go away once you know how to move between the notes he writes.

La Campanella would be a good one if you ever wanted to go back to the Hungarian No 2. I think the parts you're referencing have similar skill sets.. movement between changing notes and one static C# an octave above, right?

_________________________
Every day we are afforded a new chance. The problem with life is not that you run out of chances. In the end, what you run out of are days.